Historically, who has been more impressive at pushing Nintendo hardware, Nintendo themselves or third parties?

[haxxiy]

Shikamo said:

Some peoples will not agree with me, but Pokemon Silver & Gold on GBC. They managed to put johto and Kanto in a single gbc card (Kanto is empty af, but still a entire region).

IIRC that was just because of the increased cartridge size. If anything, their compression algorithm for Gold & Silver was worse than the one used in Red & Blue, as the people working on decompiling them found out.